Organizational Update from OpenAI

It’s been a year of dramatic change and growth at OpenAI. In May, we introduced GPT-3—the most powerful language model to date—and soon afterward launched our first commercial product, an API to safely access artificial intelligence models using simple, natural-language prompts. We’re proud of these and other research breakthroughs by our team, all made as part of our mission to achieve general-purpose AI that is safe and reliable, and which benefits all humanity.

Today we’re announcing that Dario Amodei, VP of Research, is leaving OpenAI after nearly five years with the company. Dario has made tremendous contributions to our research in that time, collaborating with the team to build GPT-2 and GPT-3, and working with Ilya Sutskever as co-leader in setting the direction for our research.

Dario has always shared our goal of responsible AI. He and a handful of OpenAI colleagues are planning a new project, which they tell us will probably focus less on product development and more on research. We support their move and we’re grateful for the time we’ve spent working together.

“We are incredibly thankful to Dario for his contributions over the past four and a half years. We wish him and his co-founders all the best in their new project, and we look forward to a collaborative relationship with them for years to come,” said OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman.

When his departure was announced at an employee meeting earlier this month, Dario told coworkers, “I want to thank Sam and thank everyone. I’m really proud of the work we’ve done together. I want to wish everyone the best, and I know that OpenAI will do really great things in the years ahead. We share the same goal of safe artificial general intelligence to benefit humanity, so it’s incumbent on all of us in this space to work together to make sure things go well.”

OpenAI is also making a few organizational changes to put greater focus on the integration of research, product, and safety. Mira Murati is taking on new responsibilities as senior vice president of Research, Product, and Partnerships, reflecting her strong leadership during our API rollout and across the company.

Sam added, “OpenAI’s mission is to thoughtfully and responsibly develop general-purpose artificial intelligence, and as we enter the new year our focus on research—especially in the area of safety—has never been stronger. Making AI safer is a company-wide priority, and a key part of Mira’s new role.”

“While GPT-3 and the other AI models we’ve developed are still nascent, we’re beginning to get a better understanding of their behavior, how to make them safer and how to align them with human preferences,” said Mira of her new role. “Our approach is to carefully use these models to improve products that people already use in their everyday lives, as well as create new products—all of which allows us to gain experience with safe deployment. At the same time, we will continue to conduct and publish research on the impact and challenges of AI, independent of our immediate product goals.”

Our team will be back in January with new research and updates on our API’s progress.

Happy New Year from all of us at OpenAI!